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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75.2 (2001) 359-360



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Book Review

A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo


Nancy Rose Hunt. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. xix + 475 pp. Ill. $59.95 (cloth), $20.95 (paperbound).

A Colonial Lexicon describes an extended medical encounter between British medical missionaries and the African men and women they employed and tended to in a small corner of the former Belgian Congo. Nancy Hunt argues that this encounter produced a set of medical ideas and practices that were distinct from those associated with either Western biomedical knowledge or indigenous medical practice. Her study attempts to capture this hybridity of meaning and experience by examining the actions, words, translations, and understandings of British missionaries and their Congolese subalterns and patients. By attempting to capture African understandings of colonial medical practice, she enters a territory that has been largely unexplored by African historians.

It should be noted at the outset that what we see of African understandings of missionary medicine in A Colonial Lexicon is largely the perceptions of those Congolese who became partners in the missions' medical and evangelizing activities. How the larger population of Congolese men and women viewed the [End Page 359] medical missionaries of Yukusu is less clear. Yet even within the confines of this limited subaltern gaze, Hunt is able to open up the colonial medical experience in new and quite original ways.

Hunt weaves her study around a series of paired terms: "crocodiles and wealth"; "doctors and airplanes"; "dining and surgery"; "babies and forceps." These terms are linked to reveal important historical connections and processes in the shared experience of colonial missionaries and their colonized flock. This strategy is not always effective. In the opening two chapters, the linking of "crocodiles and wealth" and "doctors and airplanes" to examine early struggles between missionaries and local Congolese ritual leaders over the control of medical knowledge and practice obscures as much as it reveals. Moreover, the substitution of wordplay for a more systematic analysis makes it difficult to understand Hunt's conclusions concerning the purposes and timing of libeli, a male initiation ceremony that was central to local struggles over medical meaning and practice.

Fortunately, Hunt's lexical strategy is much more effective in subsequent chapters. The third chapter, "Dining and Surgery," illuminates the ways in which the missionary dining room and the surgery theater were central to the medical mission experience. Both were sites of public performances with shared meanings for both missionaries and converts. Moreover, Hunt reveals how Congolese social advancement within the mission world of Yukusu was linked to these two settings: Congolese men and women moved from being houseboys and housegirls to being nurses and birth attendants.

The real strength of this study, however, lies in the chapters on childbearing and maternities. Here the ethnographic and historical material is rich and carefully analyzed. It is in these chapters also that Hunt most effectively takes the reader into the heart of the Congolese encounter with evangelical medicine. She provides us with an almost palpable sense of both the awe and terror that biomedical birthing practices and surgery--"c-sections" and craniotomies--inspired in those who either experienced these practices or observed them. The extent to which local birthing practices in this part of Zaire have been shaped by local understandings and knowledge is clearly revealed in Hunt's last chapter, "Debris," which describes her field experience and is ethnography as much as history. Here in the last years of Mobutu's Zaire, in a scene that could have been drawn from V. S. Naipaul's Bend in the River (1979), we see African nurses assisting in the births of babies in villages, using methods that draw as much from local practice and knowledge as from Western biomedicine.

In the end, A Colonial Lexicon is a powerful study. Hunt takes risks. She employs novel methods and approaches. She challenges historical conventions...

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